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John Varley | |
|---|---|
 Varley in 1992 | |
| Born | John Herbert Varley August 9, 1947 Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer |
| Alma mater | Michigan State University |
| Period | 1974–present |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Website | |
| varley | |
John Herbert Varley (born August 9, 1947) is an American science fiction writer.
Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, graduated from Nederland High School—all in Texas—and went to Michigan State University on a National Merit Scholarship. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived in Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco just in time for the "Summer of Love" in 1967. There he worked at various unskilled jobs, depended on St. Anthony's Mission for meals, and panhandled outside the Cala Market on Stanyan Street (since closed) before deciding that writing had to be a better way to make a living. He was serendipitously present at Woodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also has lived at various times in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, New York City, San Francisco again, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.
Varley has written several novels (his first attempt, Gas Giant, was, he admits, "pretty bad") and numerous short stories, many of them in a future history, "The Eight Worlds". These stories are set a century or two after a race of mysterious and omnipotent aliens, the Invaders, have almost completely eradicated humans from the Earth (they regard whales and dolphins to be the superior Terran lifeforms and humans only a dangerous infestation). But humans have inhabited virtually every other corner of the solar system, often through the use of biological modifications learned, in part, by eavesdropping on alien communications.
Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" was adapted and televised for PBS in 1983. In addition, two of his short stories ("Options" and "Blue Champagne") were adapted into episodes of the short-lived 1998 Sci-Fi Channel TV series Welcome to Paradox .
Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the film Millennium . Of his Millennium experience Varley said:
We had the first meeting on Millennium in 1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you'd gain something from that, but each time something's always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost. [1]
Varley is often compared[ by whom? ] to Robert A. Heinlein.[ citation needed ] In addition to a similarly descriptive writing style, similarities include a libertarian political perspective and advocacy of free love. Two of his connected novels, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe , include a sub-society of Heinleiners. [2] [ unreliable source? ]The Golden Globe also contains a society evolved from a prison colony on Pluto and a second society evolved from it on Pluto's moon, Charon, similar to the situation found in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress . Unlike Heinlein's lunar society, Varley's convict society on Charon maintains its criminal ways and is similar to the Mafia or the yakuza . His Thunder and Lightning series plays on his connection with Heinlein by deriving its main characters' names from many of Heinlein's characters, including Jubal, Manuel Garcia, Kelly, Podkayne, Cassie, and Polly, and by frequently dropping titles of Heinlein's novels in the dialogue.
In 2021, Varley announced a series of health problems including a quadruple bypass, COVID-19, and bacterial pneumonia. [3] Colleagues organized a crowdfunding campaign to pay his expenses while he was unable to write. [4] At that time he described himself as living near Vancouver, Washington.
| Year | Title | Series | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1977 | The Ophiuchi Hotline | Eight Worlds | Locus SF Award nominee, 1978 [5] |
| 1979 | Titan | Gaea Trilogy | Nebula Award nominee, 1979; [6] Locus SF Award winner and Hugo nominee, 1980 [7] |
| 1980 | Wizard | Gaea Trilogy | Hugo and Locus SF Awards nominee, 1981 [8] |
| 1983 | Millennium | Philip K. Dick Award nominee, 1983; [9] Hugo and Locus Awards nominee, 1984 [10] | |
| 1984 | Demon | Gaea Trilogy | Locus SF Award nominee, 1985 [11] |
| 1992 | Steel Beach | Eight Worlds | Hugo and Locus SF Award nominee, 1993 [12] |
| 1998 | The Golden Globe | Eight Worlds | Prometheus Award winner, 1999; Locus SF Award nominee, 1999 [13] |
| 2003 | Red Thunder | Thunder and Lightning | Endeavour Award winner, 2004; Campbell Award nominee, 2004 [14] |
| 2005 | Mammoth | ||
| 2006 | Red Lightning | Thunder and Lightning | |
| 2008 | Rolling Thunder | Thunder and Lightning | |
| 2012 | Slow Apocalypse | ||
| 2014 | Dark Lightning | Thunder and Lightning | |
| 2018 | Irontown Blues | Eight Worlds | |
Varley has won the Hugo Award three times:
and has been nominated a further twelve times.
He has won the Nebula Award twice:
and has been nominated a further six times.
He has won the Locus Award ten times:
Varley has also won the Jupiter Award, the Prix Tour-Apollo Award, several Seiun Awards, Endeavour Award, 2009 Robert A. Heinlein Award and others.
Dan Simmons is an American science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles, among other works that span the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, sometimes within a single novel. Simmons's genre-intermingling Song of Kali (1985) won the World Fantasy Award. He also writes mysteries and thrillers, some of which feature the continuing character Joe Kurtz.
Timothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. His first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates (1983), which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages. His other written work include Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985), Last Call (1992), Expiration Date (1996), Earthquake Weather (1997), Declare (2000), and Three Days to Never (2006). Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare. His 1987 novel On Stranger Tides served as inspiration for the Monkey Island franchise of video games and was partly adapted into the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film.
Vernor Steffen Vinge was an American science fiction author and professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He was the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2004).
Gregory Dale Bear was an American writer and illustrator best known for science fiction. His work covered themes of galactic conflict, parallel universes, consciousness and cultural practices, and accelerated evolution. His last work was the 2021 novel The Unfinished Land. Greg Bear wrote over 50 books in total. He was one of the five co-founders of San Diego Comic-Con.
Job: A Comedy of Justice is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein published in 1984. The title is a reference to the biblical Book of Job and James Branch Cabell's book Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 1985 and was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1984, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1985.
Joe William Haldeman is an American science fiction author.
Robert Charles Wilson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.
Christopher Mackenzie Priest was a British novelist and science fiction writer. His works include Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), The Inverted World (1974), The Affirmation (1981), The Glamour (1984), The Prestige (1995), and The Separation (2002).
Michael Lawson Bishop was an American author. Over five decades and in more than thirty books, he created what has been called a "body of work that stands among the most admired and influential in modern science fiction and fantasy literature."
Millennium is a 1983 science fiction novel by John Varley. Varley later turned this novel into the script for the 1989 film Millennium, both of which are based on Varley's short story "Air Raid", which was published in 1977.
The John Varley Reader is a representative collection of 18 of the science fiction short stories by John Varley, first published in paperback in September 2004. It features 5 new stories. Each story is preceded by an autobiographical introduction; until this book Varley had avoided discussing himself, or his works, in print.
The Eight Worlds are the fictional setting of a series of science fiction novels and short stories by John Varley, in which the Solar System has been colonized by human refugees fleeing an alien invasion of the Earth. Earth and Jupiter are off-limits to humanity, but Earth's Moon and the other worlds and moons of the Solar System have all become heavily populated. There are also minor colonies set in the Oort cloud at the edge of the Solar System. Faster than light travel is not possible, though it is mentioned that test-flights will begin soon at the end of The Golden Globe, and the species has not as yet managed to extend itself to other stars.
The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) was productive during a writing career that spanned the last 49 years of his life; the Robert A. Heinlein bibliography includes 32 novels, 59 short stories and 16 collections published during his life. Four films, two TV series, several episodes of a radio series, at least two songs and a board game derive more or less directly from his work. He wrote the screenplay for Destination Moon (1950). Heinlein also edited an anthology of other writers' science fiction short stories.
American writer C. J. Cherryh's career began with publication of her first books in 1976, Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth. She has been a prolific science fiction and fantasy author since then, publishing over 80 novels, short-story compilations, with continuing production as her blog attests. Cherryh has received the Hugo and Locus Awards for some of her novels.
Nebula Winners Twelve is an anthology of science fiction short stories edited by Gordon R. Dickson. It was first published in hardcover by Harper & Row in February 1978, and reprinted in December of the same year. A paperback edition followed from Bantam Books in April 1979.
The Persistence of Vision is a 1978 collection of science fiction stories by American writer John Varley.
"The Persistence of Vision" is a short story by American writer John Varley. It was included in the anthology of the same name and in The John Varley Reader.
Nebula Award Stories Seventeen is an anthology of award winning science fiction short works edited by Joe Haldeman. It was first published in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in August 1983; a paperback edition was issued by Ace Books in June 1985 under the variant title Nebula Award Stories 17.
Nebula Winners Fourteen is an anthology of award winning science fiction short works edited by Frederik Pohl. It was first published in hardcover by Harper & Row in August 1980. The first British edition was published in hardcover by W. H. Allen in April 1981. Paperback editions followed from Star in the U.K. in March 1982 and Bantam Books in the U.S. in July 1982.
